Gold Rush Doctor
by Special Patrol Groupie
Summary: Some gold miners in the Mother Lode wonder if their friend "Doc" is more than he seems.


Strange feller, from England by the sound of him, but everybody we knew mining claims around Mokelumne Hill seemed to be from someplace different. Lots of Spaniards, lots of Mexicans, lots of Frenchmen, lots of Australians, lots of Americans from the North and South and Midwest.  
Me, I was born in Chicago, and so was my brother Charlie, but our parents were from Köln, in Westphalia, and we grew up speaking German at home. Around 1849 we started hearing about gold in California, like half the universe had, it seemed. My brother and I agreed to go together. But I was only 13 and he was 16, so it wasn't until 1854 we managed to save up the money. We went down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, across Panama, then up to San Francisco and through the bay to Stockton, where we bought pack mules and headed up into the Sierras to the storied Mother Lode. Others came overland, risking the Rockies and the Sierra, and joking that they didn't have to eat their fellow travellers like the Donner Party had.  
But Doc, now, he never said much about his passage. "Oh, it didn't take long," he said. "Not long at all as far as such things go."  
Some people suspected he was a murderer or a thief on the loose, but most of us didn't think so. He was just too ... nice. Too genteel. Fairly tall, medium build, medium-dark brown hair with a slight wave, always clean-shaven, brown eyes, regular features. Wore the usual miner's clothes: White shirt with sleeves rolled up past the elbows; the new blue canvas trousers made by Levi Strauss, red suspenders, straw hat, boots. But that accent. ... Probably a younger son in a family of gentry, who wouldn't inherit anything, and so went off to seek adventure. He didn't want us to string up a man who had killed another over a claim, for instance; and although he looked young and talked like cut glass, as the other English folks said, the other miners listened to him and took him seriously. He told the ne'er do well to get out of Dodge and never to be seen around here again, or he couldn't be responsible for what might happen - and I'll be damned if that varmint didn't scamper.  
I can't reckon why people took Doc so seriously. Maybe it's because Doc did know something about finding gold. Or maybe it was that he could read and write several languages. All the miners came 'round to him to ask him to help them with letters from home, and they all came to trust him. Or maybe it was because he knew something about medicine and surgery, although he said he had no qualifications as a medical doctor.  
Even the Diggers respected him. "He is wise ... an old soul," an old Digger squaw said as she did the laundry one day. I had sprained my ankle and was staying off it on Doc's advice for a week. Now everyone knows you soak a sprain in hot water – everyone except Doc. He said that just made it swell up worse and told me to soak it in the coldest water we could find – well water, water from the stream, anything would do. He also told me to keep it bound tight – that made sense. And finally he said it would heal faster if I stayed off it. I told him it was just a sprain and I had a claim to work. He just looked at me, muttered something about taking too long for some things and not long enough for others, and went off to work his claim. And for some reason I just didn't feel like getting up after he looked at me that way.  
"What do you mean old soul?" I asked her.  
"He is older than he seems," the squaw said. (She had a name, but I'll be damned if I could pronounce it or spell it. I'm lucky I can spell Mokelumne.) "He has been here before, many times, in many years."  
"How so?" I asked. I didn't believe a word of what she said when she went off into these nonsensical fantasies, but they were at least entertaining. And she did have a pretty daughter, or granddaughter or niece or something.  
"He changes. He travels through time. He leaves, he comes back. He is different every time. Now short and old, now tall and manly, now ... young body, but old soul. He only grows wiser. We call him - " and another one of those long names came roiling out of her toothless mouth. But it ended in -umne, and I'd been around long enough to know that umne meant "man" to them. Probably "wise albino man" or something like that.  
I must have been feeling unusually restless. "How do you know it's the same fellow every time?" I asked her.  
"We know. He tells us things he should not know about us as a white stranger. We know."  
Doc never seemed tired when he came back from the claim. He examined my ankle, wrapped it up again and told me to keep soaking it in cold water.  
That night some of the other American miners came to see me. They brought some beans and cornbread and a jug of whisky. Old Alf Doten brought his fiddle and we had ourselves a fandango – or they did, and I watched. So did Doc. But we had the whisky, and we kept drinking to the dancers. Pretty soon we had gotten pretty damn tight.  
"The Digger squaw says you have an old soul, Doc," I said.  
"Mott, please, don't call her a squaw," Doc said. "It's like calling a white woman a whore."  
"Shows what you know," I said, taking another drink.  
"Well, all right, not in their language. But you call them Diggers too, and that's kind of insulting."  
"Sure thing, Doc," I jeered.  
"I'm serious," Doc said, poking my chest. "I don't call you apes, and yet –"  
He cut himself off, but I was mad.  
"Don't think you're better'n us because you're from England," I snarled.  
"I'm not from England."  
"Then where are you from?"  
"Somewhere else."  
"Somewhere they think Americans are apes?"  
"No, Mott, please ... I've just had a bit too much to drink, that's all. I'm going to bed."  
And he got up and walked unsteadily toward his cabin.

Next day I woke up with a humdinger of a hangover – but so did everyone else. Praise God that Sunday is a day of rest. All I was able to eat was tea and toast. Alf, who had bunked with me, made them for me. He also invited several of the fellows over for a fuller breakfast. The smell of the frying bacon made my stomach turn, but I said nothing.  
"So what was that argument you had with Doc about?" 1 asked.  
"I don't remember," I lied. "It was nothing. Just a couple of men who'd had too much to drink."  
Alf ate a forkful of fried eggs. "He's a strange one, that Doc. Won't say where he's from, what he did, how he knows what he knows."  
The Piker started in. He was from Pike County, Missouri, not too smart but a hard worker. Tended to run off at the mouth a lot. "Remember Fred? Fred – uh McSomething … well, the carrot-top from Georgia? Remember how he couldn't mine his way out of a paper bag? And how he was going to give up and go back home? And he was going to be disgraced? And how he suddenly struck it rich? And everyone went panning on his old claim -"  
"Get to the point," I snapped.  
"Well, he didn't find those nuggets. Doc gave them to him."  
"What do you mean, gave?" Alf asked.  
"What do you mean, what do I mean? They went off a little bit, just past the Doc's cabin, and the Doc reached into his pocket and gave him those same nuggets he showed us."  
Everyone knew the Piker was about as reliable as the Digger, so we didn't believe it – but at the same time, I wouldn't have been surprised if Doc had done something like that.  
"Maybe they were fool's gold," 1 said.  
"Naw, Doc wouldn't do something like that," Alf said. "Not to someone like Fred, anyway. He'd probably try to do that to me or Mott, someone who'd have a chance of figuring out the truth."  
I was flattered that Alf included me in that category. I didn't read or write very well; Alf did both. He even got paid for the letters he sent to the newspaper in his hometown of Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the Pilgrims first set foot on American soil. I felt kind of slow and stupid next to Alf sometimes. But Doc, I realized, was far beyond all of us. Maybe that's why he called us apes.  
The puzzle of who Doc was and what he wanted kept the miners entertained for weeks – at least when Doc wasn't around. When Doc was around, and we were relaxing after a long day of work, we liked to try to make him blush. Or we'd listen as he recited poetry or told us myths about the constellations.

One day Doc asked me to go with him to San Francisco. He was running low on provisions. I agreed. I wanted to get away for a few days, and he was good company. And maybe I would be able to pry the truth out of him.  
We started after sunset, hoping the valley would be cooled off by the time we came out of the mountains. We hoped to make it to Stockton by sunrise. From there, we'd take a boat, same way I came in.  
In a clearing, a shooting star crossed the sky. Doc smiled at it.  
"Ever wonder," he said, "about life on other planets?"  
I stared at him. That was the strangest idea he'd had yet. "You mean like Mars and Venus?"  
"Or on planets going around other stars," he said agreeably.  
"Well," I said slowly, "it isn't in the Bible."  
"You don't strike me as the religious sort, Mott."  
"I'm not," I admitted, "but it's still not in the Bible."  
"The Bible also says the sun goes around the Earth, but you know now that isn't true."  
"That's true," I admitted. "But that doesn't mean there's life anywhere else. God created heaven and earth –"  
"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Matthias Riehm, than are dreamt of in your religion," Doc said, pronouncing my full name with a perfect Koelsch accent.  
"What in tarnation does that mean?"  
"Exactly what it says."  
We walked on in silence, but my mind was working on that juicy question. "Well, I don't suppose it matters if there's life on other planets," I said slowly. "They can't get to us."  
"Can't they?" Doc asked quizzically. "You believe in angels and devils, don't you?"  
Truth be told, I wasn't sure if I did or not. "Do you?"  
"After a fashion."  
"What does that mean?"  
"I don't believe in them the way it's been explained in Christian mythology, but I believe in … beings more advanced than humans, yes."  
"Mythology!" I exploded – more out of habit than conviction.  
"Calm down, Mott. Sooner or later you'll have to realize that many of the things you've been taught under the name of 'religion' are just someone's fancy – or maybe it's a good idea, but not divinely ordained. But that's not what I want to talk about right now. Focus on the latter clause of my sentence. Beings more advanced than humans. Think about it."  
"Have you been drinking?"  
"No."  
"Smoking opium?"  
"No."  
"Are you mad?"  
"Perfectly sane."  
"You've been around the Diggers too much."  
"How much is 'too much'?"  
"When you start spouting nonsense like that, it's too much."  
Doc simply shook his head and walked on, and said nothing until we reached Stockton, just as the sun was rising over the Sierra.

Of course I reported this conversation to my friends when we got back.  
"Well," the Piker said, "funny you should say that, because I went into his cabin one day when he was out on his claim."  
We all leaned closer. Nobody had ever been in Doc's cabin.  
"And he's got this weird blue … cabinet, I guess. Or shed. Inside."  
"Where'd he get blue paint?"  
"That's not the strange part. The strange part is when I opened the door to the cabinet. It had a lock, but it wasn't locked up. I saw …"  
"Oh, hello, Doc!" called Alf, standing. We all turned; there Doc was, coming in from his claim, covered in mud. "You're just in time. We're just thinking about having another fandango Saturday night. You in?"

Doc took over a claim next to mine that August when the owner gave up and went back home. We agreed to combine the claims, work together and split the profits. The claims were both hard to work, with a steep creek bank running through them. We thought that there was a possibility of gold in the creek bank, and decided to dig into it.  
We built a new cradle, a bigger version of a gold pan, with which to sift through the earth for the heavier flakes of gold. We drew straws; I got to dig into the bank in the morning; Doc would rock the cradle.  
I was just about to put the second pan of dirt in the cradle when Doc jumped at me. "Look out!" he shouted, shoving me into the creek. I was angry; I wanted to beat the dirty varmint … but when I pulled myself out of the creek, I saw that the bank had collapsed and he was buried under tons and tons of dirt.  
I shouted for help, and soon I had a dozen or so men around, digging madly to free him, or his body. He was still breathing. We quickly cut some tree limbs, lashed them together, stretched a blanket over it and carried him back toward the encampment. He started moaning as we neared my cabin.  
"Easy, Doc," I said. "We're fetching a … doctor."  
"No, no doctors," he groaned. "Take me … to my cabin."  
"Doc—"  
"Do it!" he hissed.  
We did. There was a note of command we had to obey.  
"No farther," he said. "Help me to stand, Mott."  
I had to carry him pig-a-back, as if he was a child. He only allowed me into the rough-hewn shelter; inside was the blue box that the Piker had told me about. He couldn't walk, so he told me to close my eyes and go inside the box. I heard metal clanging against my feet.  
"There. Put me … down, Mott."  
I did, but I had to open my eyes. …  
"Tell no one," Doc said.  
"They wouldn't believe it anyway."  
"Now I must say goodbye, Mott. It was good working with you. And talking to you."  
A strange golden glow enveloped his body. I was too frightened to see what happened next; I ran out of the closet, the cabin, the encampment.


End file.
